WHERE BLUE SKIES TURN BLACK

On the morning of April 12, 1961, a Soviet pilot named Yuri Gagarin sat strapped to an ejection seat in the cockpit of his craft awaiting the start of his next flight. As a serving air force officer there was nothing strange about that, except that the “craft” was a spacecraft, not an aircraft, and Gagarin was lying on his back, not sitting upright in the normal flying position. One other significant difference in his pending flight was that Gagarin was sitting on a rocket standing on a launchpad instead of in a military jet on the end of a runway. It was true that Gagarin was about to fly into the atmosphere once more, but not for long. Within minutes of leaving the launchpad he was passing through the upper reaches of the planet’s atmosphere, where blue skies turn black and “air” becomes “space”, pioneering a new mode of transport, that of manned space flight.

Since that day, small steps and giant strides have been made in the exploration of space, be it by automated satellites, space probes, or crewed

D. J. Shayler and M. D. Shayler, Manned Spaceflight LogII—2006—2012, Springer Praxis Books 158, DOl 10.1007/978-1-4614-4577-7_1, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

vehicles. Each and every mission adds to the database of experience, whether successful or not. There had been arguments for and against human space explora­tion even before Gagarin left the pad. Over the decades, these have expanded to include debates on the militarization of space; on the importance of scientific objec­tives; the direction of future space efforts and how they could be financed; the drain on science and unmanned programs to fund manned activities; and whether the budget should be spent on space at all when there are so many problems here on Earth. These arguments will certainly continue for many decades to come, counter­ing the natural global evolution of the program, but on the 50th anniversary of Gagarin’s mission (April 2011), the time was right to take stock and review what had been achieved in human space flight, how we had arrived there, and where to go in the future.

There have been countless volumes over the previous six decades or so that have provided an exhaustive narrative of various manned space flight programs, the hardware, operations, and results. The basic records of these missions were recorded in the earlier edition of this log (Praxis Manned Spaceflight Log 1961­2006, Tim Fumiss and David J. Shayler with Michael D. Shayler, Springer-Praxis 2007) providing both a handy reference in its own right, and a companion volume to the various titles that examined each program and mission in more detail.

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